- Venue
- BFI Studio Space
- Location
Coinciding with the MOVE exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, the BFI has devoted both its gallery space and, for four afternoons, its Studio Space, to an exploration of Yvonne Rainer’s work and influences. The intimate viewing space of the Studio provided a perfect place to take in a programme of videos which explore, broadly speaking, the interaction of moving image works with choreography. As well as a selection of work by international artists, the screenings were also an opportunity to catch pieces from Rainer’s series, Five Easy Pieces, films that I had previously only ever seen on UBU or Youtube. The five hour duration meant viewers were free to come and go as they pleased, and I caught the 2nd and 4th cycle of films.
From the selection I watched, the programme seemed to touch on two fields: language and linguistic structures in video, and movement, especially of the body and of bodies in space. These two areas are linked through the logic of the score, prominent in experimental music and dance as well as in conceptual art, through the exploration of the political and aesthetic implications of art based on instructions. Thus the linguistic is inscribed in many of the videos, despite the absence of spoken or written language in the form of voiceovers, dialogue or subtitles, through the score that sets them up.
Exploring movement on a human scale were videos such as Prune Tourne, by Michel François, which followed a woman with long reddish hair spinning; plus two videos of ‘obstructed’ piano playing, the first showing a hand playing while wearing splints, the second, Audience by Bea McMahon following a recital on a piano covered by slobbering snails, intercut with close-ups of the creatures sliming over the keys and each other. These, along with Rainer’s video Volleyball, seemed to be fairly straightforward examples of setting up a simple score, or instruction, for the video and then following it through, in a deadpan, unvarnished way, which fit with Rainer’s interest in ‘task-like’, quotidian actions.
Rainer’s Hand Movie (1966) also comes to mind, a video which shows hands moving in a continuous flow that eschews any sense of rise and fall, illustrating her desire to avoid the reliance on creating a focus of attention within the movements so that “No part …is any more important”. She saw this formal structure of building and releasing energy, culminating in iconic sections of attack, as part of the whole structure that supports a dance of exhibitionism and display, which she opposed.
Despite this objection to overt expressiveness, some of the videos in her selection rejected an aesthetic of detached coolness, instead using the body to expressive or political ends. Hands, by Adam Roberts/ Jonathan Burrows, told a whole story only by the hands and music fully using the communicative potential of the hands; Head Hand, by Sonia Kurana showed the artist’s hand caressing and pummeling a black man’s head, his eyes closed while the movements of the hand alternated between sweet and soft to slightly aggressive, supposedly representing a multi-layered negotiation with race, gender and sexuality. Rainer spoke of being opposed to the exhibitionism and narcissism of the body as it appears and is used in most dances, but also stressed it was “also true that I love the body- its actual weight, mass, and unenhanced physicality.” These videos brought out the idea that the corporeal, fleshy aspect of the body could act as limit, an opposition to the “pseudo-world” of the spectacle, as Carrie Lambert writes in her essay, Moving Still: Mediating Yvonne Rainer’s “Trio A”, acting politically against the endless production of images. She quotes Rainer: “My body remains the enduring reality”, a phrase which suited quite a few of the videos in the screening, with their focus on bodies spinning, touching, stroking, playing instruments and feeling their way through physical space.
While these videos focused more on the individual human form, a thread running through a group of other video was the human mass, and its movement through physical and political spaces. Yael Bartana’s well-known piece Kings of the Hill silently observes men in Israel driving gas guzzlers up and down steep sand dunes, in an improvised collective dance of negotiating the uneven terrain. Movement here appeared at first to be unconstrained, almost playful, with no boundaries, roads or officials in place to control it, but within that was an ominous undercurrent of containment, a sense of movement only within the allocated space. It was hard to avoid reading this as an allusion to the curtailment of human movement characteristic of Israeli policies and the more general sense of impasse generated by Middle Eastern politics. Providing further insight into this geographical area, The Flag, by Koken Ergun, shows the effectiveness of modern brainwashing at mass youth rallies in Turkey, in good socialist realist style: little bodies choreographed from childhood into their allotted place in the dance and in the wider culture. Language in this video was exposed as an instrument of nationalism, fully exploited for its powers of persuasion, of emotive storytelling and nation-building, as small children were overcome with feeling while being watched approvingly by adults in the bleachers.
The capacity of language to create and solidify national identities obviously includes its capacity for activating the opposite impulse: exclusion, segregation and singling out due to language differences. Anri Sala’s video Lak-kat showed young boys in Senegal trying to learn the correct way to pronounce words in Wolof which all related to variations in skin hue: from dark black to whitey, all words associated with colonialism and its implicit valuation of these colours. Language here sets people apart, arranges them on scale, and values them accordingly; naming becomes a function of social positioning.
Seen in relation to MOVE: Choreographing You, at the Hayward, which explores relations between dance, art and participation, the moving image works seemed to cast a more sombre shadow, as if to remind the viewer that despite the playful aspects of participation and dance- which seemed more in evidence in the exhibition- bodies are equally subject to exclusion, coercion and separation. Perhaps by paying attention to this aspect, Rainer’s belief in the body a site of resistance, capable of generating its own language against the social and political structures which would limit its movement, is given a platform from which to speak.
